How to Increase Brand Awareness With Content

It’s difficult to vie for a customer’s business if they don’t know who you are. Of course, alerting them to your presence isn’t as easy as riding a bike downhill.

When you’re searching for how to increase brand awareness, you’ll likely see that advertising is an option – but it’s not always the best one if budget and ROI are of concern.

A better strategy for appealing to the masses as well as your target audience is to use high-quality content to raise the visibility of your brand. By its nature, content marketing boosts brand awareness (i.e., getting lots of people to see your brand). However, there are specific strategies to use when brand awareness is your No. 1 goal.

Keep reading for what these strategies are, the real ways they are used, and how you can implement the techniques in your own strategy.

General Brand Awareness Strategy

When you want your content to reach as many people as possible, your brand awareness strategy should be geared toward mainstream topics that appeal to high-authority news sites with large followings.

We’ll use one of our most successful campaigns, Most Instagrammed Locations, as an example to illustrate the five steps of a basic general brand awareness strategy.

Choose an idea that has broad appeal.

This is a crucial component for upping your content’s viral potential, which is a common goal that coincides with brand awareness. If your company offers a good or service to the general public, then this is an easy feat. But if you sell something that isn’t universal, your content idea should extend further from your offerings.

We use this approach often when we’re asked how to drive awareness on a mass scale. Our Instagram study for Busbud is the perfect example. Busbud is an online bus travel service, but if their content stuck to buses only, it wouldn’t appeal to the general population. We zoomed out and focused the idea on places throughout the United States and Canada that people took Instagram snaps of the most.

We chose Instagram because of its immense popularity (more than 600 million monthly users), and even if audiences didn’t use it themselves, they’d likely heard of it.

While the idea doesn’t center specifically on bus travel, it is related to the general travel vertical, and when new audiences were exposed to the content, they were made aware of Busbud as an option for when their next travel plans arose.

Why not come up with an engaging idea about bus travel instead? Because when you’re shooting for mass exposure, you want your content to appeal to as many publishers as possible. You certainly wouldn’t find as many top-tier sites seeking stories about buses as you would travel.

Do comprehensive research and use credible sources.

To make your content newsworthy, the foundation needs to be rock solid. Otherwise, publishers won’t trust your content or want to feature it.

If you’re creating a project that pulls from existing research, only high-quality, recent sources should be used. (Our post on educational content discusses this in-depth.)

But to really get your brand attention, original research is the best way to go. When you have something to offer the media that nobody else can, your content does two things:

It can become highly desirable to some of the biggest publishers because it’s a brand new story – no angle pivot or outside research needed, making the work easier on the writers.

It acts as a resource for future related stories, which leads to writers linking back to it continuously over time.

For Most Instagrammed Places, we started our research with TripAdvisor, locating the top-rated locales in North America. Then we took to Instagram, using its API, and tracked down the most common hashtags used for those locations. The results were:

From there, we crunched the numbers and came up with a variety of charts and maps to show the type of locations (e.g., national park, beach, and theater) as well as specific locations (like Disneyland) that were posted the most on Instagram.

The campaign didn’t show the tens of thousands of hashtags and locations, but it was important to do the in-depth analysis in order to gather accurate results. There’s no doubt the extra effort gave weight to the project and appealed to journalists’ desire for comprehensive and authoritative reports.

Keep the look simple and ensure it’s easy to understand.

Sometimes, we want to get fancy and create elaborate designs. Graphic artists want to showcase their skills and design really beautiful stuff. But it’s important to remember that you’re putting together graphics that need to appeal to the general public – not the curators at MoMA.

This is a lesson that’s quickly forgotten when you’re pouring all your energy into a piece of content you want to stand out from all the noise of the internet. Our advice is simple: Silence your inner artist and don’t get artsy-fartsy when creating general brand awareness content.

Instead, go for clean designs that aren’t distracting and let the data/results/information speak for itself. In the chart below, we could’ve included photos or renderings of the top Canadian locations, but they would’ve taken attention away from the basic information – and they simply weren’t needed.

The copy in your designed graphics, as well as what surrounds them on your webpage, should be straightforward. A few tips on crafting your text:

PRO TIP: When reviewing your copy, ask yourself if every person in your extended family (barring small children) could easily understand what you wrote. If they can’t, get to revising and simplifying.

Make it easy to access.

Your goal with general brand awareness content is to have it spread around, and if it’s hard or impossible for media outlets to feature it, then you’ve defeated the point. Plus, it’s not difficult to make it accessible.

You can either make a blog post for the content or a landing page (i.e., a separate webpage on your site where the whole project lives). You’re essentially creating a story that flows from beginning to end – here’s a sample layout:

The embed codes are especially important to include for interactive components (e.g., sliding images and zoomable maps) because publishers can’t use them otherwise. Since your primary goal is to increase brand awareness – and not build links – allowing other sites to easily grab and host your graphics without needing to reach out to you is crucial. Trust us, the easier you make it for the media to use your content, the greater your chances of having it covered.

You also up the likelihood of coverage if you offer the same content packaged in different ways. Doing this expands your content’s reach with publishers who are able to pick and choose the format that works best for their site and audience.

With our Most Instagrammed Locations campaign, we created an interactive map of the United States and Canada. Viewers could click it to get an up-close look at specific states, provinces, or territories. It’s intuitive, and the clear yet concise instructions at the top gave a little extra help for those who needed it. Here’s a snapshot of it:

But not all publishers’ sites have the technical capabilities to host interactive graphics, so we also made two charts with the same information – one for the U.S. and one for Canada.

PRO TIP: When strategizing how to increase brand awareness, don’t forget about making shareable graphics and text for your social media accounts. It can be helpful to make a calendar of when you plan to launch posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Promote the heck out of it.

Making high-quality content that is optimized for all the keywords you want might help you with SEO, but it’s not going to do much for broad brand awareness. Content sitting on your site unpromoted is like putting a new cereal brand on the shelves without advertising it. Sure, people may stumble across it, but you’re missing a huge potential audience.

Promoting content isn’t a rocket science, but there are a lot of tricks to the trade that can seriously elevate your outreach efforts. Fortunately, our Tell-All Guide to Digital PR offers insights we gathered from over 1,300 publishers. It also includes tips like:

Look at publishers’ engagement levels when deciding who to pitch your exclusive to.

Don’t send outreach emails on holidays (or the day before and after).

Keep your subject lines to 10 words or fewer.

Don’t be too self-promotional.

Successful outreach takes time and dedication. Don’t put it on the backburner and waste the great work you’ve done making your content. After you’ve built relationships with writers and editors, you can conduct media relations outreach more efficiently in the future.

When our media relations department began promoting the Most Instagrammed Locations campaign, it quickly garnered interest from TIME, Yahoo, Business Insider, and over 300 other publications. It was also shared close to 37,000 times on social. But what really increased brand awareness for Busbud was the television coverage. Let’s go into that next.

Increase Visibility With Local Angles

Newscasters from across the United States and Canada shared Busbud’s Instagram story with their viewers. (Check out the video compilation here.) What about it piqued the interest of so many news stations? The local angle.

The campaign had something to say about every single state, province, and territory, so the reach in North America was unlimited. When geo-bait is used in content, it casts a net that captures everyone in the locations represented. (Geo-bait means a geographic focus that makes readers want to see how their location is represented.)

We’ve seen a big boost in brand awareness for our clients who choose campaigns that are based on geographical areas (i.e., maps).

For example, we created Bar-Hopping: The Ultimate Bar Road Trip, which featured 196 of the oldest bars in America. Publishers from coast to coast were able to find their area’s historic bars and share it with their readers in their coverage.

This campaign for Trippy included an interactive map (see below) and graphics that ranked the states with the most bars, called out the bars with the latest “last calls,” and named the bars with five-star reviews on TripAdvisor.

The diverse components of this campaign gave local publishers several reasons to feature the project, which is a good tactic to use when creating geo-bait content of your own.

Unexpected Benefits of General Brand Awareness

After discovering how to increase brand awareness with content, you might come across some upsides you didn’t anticipate. For instance, the good press we earned for Busbud made them look good among potential employees.

Our associate director of marketing, Kerry Jones, added:

Now that we’ve covered how to increase brand exposure for general audiences, let’s look at gaining visibility in your niche.

Targeted Brand Awareness Strategy

If your product or service is intended for a select group of people only, make sure a targeted brand awareness approach is part of your overall marketing strategy.

For instance, a company that manufactures farming equipment should focus on marketing to farmers and those in the agriculture industry – the only people who would purchase its product.

We’ve helped many clients boost their brand recognition with an awareness strategy that’s directed at their target audience. The steps outlined in the section above apply here as well, except you won’t choose an idea that has broad appeal. Instead, you’ll hone in on your niche’s community.

You must fully understand your brand’s space to see where the needs are and the topics that industry publications would be interested in. This means researching the online community your audience is a part of and using that insight to guide your ideation (i.e., the process in which you come up with ideas).

Here is how we used this strategy for clients in various industries:

The Marketing Niche

Alexa came to us seeking more exposure for its SEO tools in the B2B marketing niche. First, we researched the online publications that marketers frequent, including:

Marketing Land

Adweek

Marketing Insider Group

Hubspot

Inc.

During this initial phase, we immersed ourselves in the articles that performed best – reading the comments and paying attention to the number of social shares or other engagement signals (e.g., page views). We knew from the beginning the biggest piece of the puzzle would be positioning Alexa as a thought leader in the marketing sphere; the research we conducted helped us choose what topics there was opportunity to demonstrate value with.

Brand Awareness Campaign Example

We wanted to showcase what Alexa’s competitive intelligence tools could accomplish so that readers would look at them as an authority on the topic. We used those tools to examine four pieces of viral content for the campaign Measuring the Effects of Virality, which showed the global rank, reach, and page views for each.

While marketers would have found the above chart interesting, we had to take it one step further to truly resonate with that audience. While researching the marketing niche, we learned these readers wanted content that’s actionable. So we added the following component to each case study within the campaign:

Our homework paid off: Both Inc. and HubSpot offered our client guest post slots, which is a great way for marketing gurus to demonstrate their authority. The campaign was featured on 150 other sites as well.

The Travel Niche

The travel industry has a big audience and many top-tier publishers, so getting your travel-related content covered should be easy, right? Think again. The larger an online community is, the more competition there is.

Eager for the challenge, we began our research into travel publications and blogs, including:

Condé Nast Traveler

Lonely Planet

Yahoo! Traveler

Travel + Leisure

Travel Daily News

We learned that travel enthusiasts enjoyed content that showcased travel destinations as well as topics related to transportation, traveling tips, and surprising facts. Armed with this background information, our ideation sessions revolved around these subject matters.

Brand Awareness Campaign Example

As mentioned in the case study on our engagement with Travelmath, we knew it was important to position the client as an authority in the travel niche. One way to do this is by coming up with a formula for a ranking system. We settled on doing this for U.S. airports.

In addition to the overall top lists – which were created with stats on flight delays, lost baggage incidents, and fare prices – we made graphics showing the airports with the longest and shortest U.S. Customs and Border Protection wait times and the airports with the most TSA claims. We also created an interactive content feature that allowed viewers to sort through the airport rankings by the criteria of their choosing.

This comprehensive campaign was robust enough to catch the eye of over 300 publishers, including Yahoo! Travel. It was also shared nearly 14,000 times on various social networks.

The Sex & Relationships and Health Niches

A U.K. client that came to us wanting to increase their authority, DrEd is an online medical provider that offers confidential men’s, women’s, and sexual health services. To understand the target audience that DrEd wanted to be exposed to, we delved into both the sex/relationships and health niches and gathered insights for what publishers and readers like the most. These included:

The Independent’s Love & Sex

CafeMom

Maxim

BroBible

People

Glamour

While we came across plenty of lighthearted and fun pieces of content that performed well, we needed to tie in trustworthiness to the campaigns to have DrEd recognized for its integrity and clout.

Brand Awareness Campaign Example

For American vs. European Sexual Preferences, we thought outside the box and crafted a survey that used mouse-tracking technology to obtain the results from 1,000 people. One of the components of the campaign was a video that showed the respondents’ selections to the various questions. Here’s a screenshot:

Brands can say they conducted a survey, but this was proof of ours. This type of method helps build trust in your brand among publications and readers.

In an added effort to increase brand awareness, we created additional graphics that tied into the video and were more shareable. Not counting the video and screenshots, there were nine extra graphics that gave publishers more content to choose from in their coverage. Here’s one of them:

The brand awareness strategy paid off, with top-tier sites such as Maxim and The Independent featuring the campaign.

It’s important to note that the language we used in the copy of the landing page was straight-forward and professional. See an excerpt below:

By using this tone in the text, we showed that DrEd was respectful of the opinions and sexual preferences and habits of all consumers. This piece of content helped advocate the brand as trustworthy and a place readers could turn to for health issues or concerns.

Now, we’ll cover one more client who sought brand awareness in their industry niche: sports.

To achieve those goals, we strategized a mix of evergreen content and timely, newsworthy campaigns that revolved around major sporting events. Some of the audiences we wanted Fanatics to tap into included:

USA Today Sports

MSN Sports

The Score

Sports Illustrated

ESPN

Given our team members working on the account were already a part of the sports community, we kept in mind that the brand was “all about the fans” – and our research and ideation honed in on that.

Brand Awareness Campaign Example

For the full-scale NBA Playoffs on Twitter campaign, we tracked the number of tweets that mentioned teams and select players as well as tweets that came from the teams themselves. From there, we calculated fan engagement and presented a live ranking of the NBA playoffs on Twitter.

Because we covered all of the teams and top players in the playoffs, publishers were able to focus on who were outperforming the others. As an example, USA Today’s coverage of the campaign featured this headline:

Our case study on Fanatics discusses some of the evergreen blog content and other content marketing campaigns we created for the brand. All in all, six months of work resulted in a 1,100% increase in organic traffic for the site.

Unexpected Benefits of Relevant Brand Awareness

What type of results could you expect from a target brand awareness approach?

Fractl’s Kerry Jones offered insights on how it affects lead generation: “As a B2B brand, the obvious benefit we’ve seen at Fractl from increased brand awareness is a significant uptick in our inbound lead volume.

“But it hasn’t only been the volume of leads that has increased for us due to more brand recognition,” she continued. “Lead quality has improved, while the time it takes to close a lead has decreased.”

Now You Know How to Increase Brand Awareness

While many marketers use content for SEO and link-building purposes, building brand awareness is also a direct result of content marketing. Depending on your specific goals, though, the strategies we explained above are more likely to boost your brand’s exposure to either a mass audience or a more targeted niche.

Remember, if you’re unsure of your brand’s visibility, our Brand Real Estate tool can help you determine how much your brand is out there.